Page:Resolutions and Decisions of the Third Congress of the Red International of Labor Unions (1924).pdf/36

 if at the beginning financial sacrifices may seem heavy for the union organizations, the international revolutionary movement will soon reap the fruits of active propaganda and systematic work among the energetic workers who are compelled by the cruel necessity of the struggle for existence to quit their native land and who, therefore, often manifest a higher fighting spirit than the passive masses who stay at home.

The Third Congress of the R. I. L. U. once more states the necessity of dispelling the illusions spread among the working masses by the selfish appeals of the employers who are interested in encouraging emigration. In every country the proletariat is subject to cruel exploitation and must stand unemployment, lengthening of labor hours and cuts in wages. Emigration makes it possible for capitalism to perpetuate this state of affairs. It will disappear only in consequence of a world revolution, when all wealth will pass into the hands of those who create it, the proletariat of all countries.

HE general offensive of capital in the last few years has shown with the greatest clearness that the lowering of the standard of living of the whole of the working class, namely the reduction in wages, the lengthening of the working day, and even the partial, in some case complete, abolition of labor legislation has dealt most hardly with the woman worker.

This is explained by the fact that despite the great numerical strength of women in production, their active participation in the work of the trade unions in all countries, with the exception of the union of Soviet Socialist Republics, is extraordinarily insignificant.

This and the lack of class consciousness among the women workers are exploited by the capitalists for the purpose not only of sharpening competition between the male and the female sections of the working class, but to create in the ranks of the working class itself a support for their counter-revolutionary endeavors. In this way they wish to break the unity of the proletrianproletarian [sic] defensive and offensive.

The reformist trade unions are fully to blame for the success of capitalist designs, up to the present, for they only make a sham of defending the interests of the working woman. By their policy of class collaboration, by their criminal lack of activity and by failing to enforce their own rules, they help to maintain the most brutal forms of exploitation of the women workers and cause their flight from the unions.

The Amsterdam leaders have hitherto done nothing to make the class fighting spirit of the women workers manifest itself, but, on the contrary, they always suppressed any expression of a will to fight, and time and again even opposed those women workers who had already started the fight (Germany).

It is a pressing duty of the revolutionary trade unions to offer energetic resistance to the machinations of the capitalist and reformists by means of class education activities among the women and by drawing